New York (city) - geography.

New York (city) - geography. I INTRODUCTION New York (city), the largest city in the United States, the home of the United Nations, and the center of global finance, communications, and business. New York City is unusual among cities because of its high residential density, its extraordinarily diverse population, its hundreds of tall office and apartment buildings, its thriving central business district, its extensive public transportation system, and its more than 400 distinct neighborhoods. The city's concert houses, museums, galleries, and theaters constitute an ensemble of cultural richness rivaled by few cities. In 2000 the population of the city of New York was 8,008,278; the population of the metropolitan region was 21,199,865. Located in the southeastern part of New York State just east of northern New Jersey, the city developed at the point where the Hudson and Passaic rivers mingle with the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Long Island Sound. The harbor consists of the Upper Bay (an arm of the Atlantic Ocean) as well as the East River and the various waterways that border the city. Its harbor is one of the largest and finest in the world and is ice-free in all seasons. New York has a temperate climate with annual precipitation of 1,200 mm (47 in) per year. The temperature ranges between 41°C (106° F) and -24° C (-11° F), but the Atlantic Ocean tends to moderate weather extremes in the city. It is about the same latitude as Naples, Italy. Although the Dutch founded the city in 1624 and called it Fort Amsterdam and then New Amsterdam, the English captured the settlement in 1664 and renamed it New York, after the Duke of York, who later became James II of England. II NEW YORK CITY AND ITS METROPOLITAN AREA Unlike most American cities, which make up only a part of a particular county, New York is made up of five separate counties, which are called boroughs. Originally the city included only the borough of Manhattan, located on an island between the Hudson and East rivers. In 1898 a number of surrounding communities were incorporated into the city as the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. The Bronx is the only borough on the mainland of the United States. Manhattan and Staten Island are surrounded by water, while Queens and Brooklyn are part of Long Island. A Queens Queens is the largest of the five boroughs. Covering 282.9 sq km (109.2 sq mi) at the western end of Long Island, Queens is separated from Brooklyn by Newtown Creek and from the rest of the city by the East River and Long Island Sound. It stretches to the Atlantic Ocean on the south and borders Nassau County on the east. It is overwhelmingly residential and is probably one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the world. In 2000 Queens had 2,229,379 residents and was second in population only to Brooklyn among the five boroughs. The neighborhoods of Queens have a strong sense of individual identity. Some are heavily industrial, like Long Island City, Maspeth, and College Point; others--like Douglaston, Forest Hill Gardens, and Kew Gardens--are suburban-style enclaves of the well-to-do. Major ethnic concentrations include the Greeks in Astoria; the Irish in Woodside; the Italians in Maspeth and Ridgewood; African-Americans in Hollis, Cambria Heights, St. Albans, and South Jamaica; and Jews in Forest Hills. Large numbers of Chinese and Koreans live in Queens, with particularly heavy concentrations in Flushing, Jackson Heights, Corona, and Elmhurst. Queens is the home of Shea Stadium, Aqueduct Racetrack, the National Tennis Center, and both LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports. Queens hosted the World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964. Queens has more than 6,400 acres of parkland, almost as much as the other four boroughs combined, and it has 16 km (10 mi) of beaches along the Atlantic Ocean. Queens is known for its numerous and enormous cemeteries. For example, Calvary Cemetery is the burial site of 2.5 million persons, more than any other burial ground in the United States. B Brooklyn Brooklyn is the second largest and most populous of the five boroughs. It is located on the southwestern tip of Long Island west of Queens and situated across the Upper Bay and the East River from Manhattan. The borough has a land area of 182.9 sq km (70.6 sq mi). Brooklyn had 2,465,326 residents in 2000, more than any other U.S. city, with the exception of the entire city of New York and the cities of Los Angeles and Chicago. Indeed, as a separate municipality before 1898, it was the third largest city in the United States. Brooklyn retains a strong separate identity. It has an important central business district and dozens of varied and clearly identifiable neighborhoods, including BedfordStuyvesant, the largest black community in the United States, and Williamsburg, Crown Heights, and Borough Park, all of which have large populations of Orthodox Jews. Brooklyn is the home of such major cultural institutions as the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Coney Island is well known for its beaches and amusement parks. Prospect Park, a landscaped area of broad drives and wooded hills, contains a restored carousel dating from 1912 and the Lefferts Homestead, a Dutch colonial farmhouse dating from 1783. C Staten Island Staten Island is the third largest and least populous of the five boroughs. It is located at the juncture of Upper New York Bay and Lower New York Bay. The island is physically closer to New Jersey, to which it is connected by three bridges, than to the rest of New York City, to which it is connected only by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the world-famous Staten Island Ferry. Staten Island encompasses 151.5 sq km (58.5 sq mi). The southernmost of the five boroughs, Staten Island had 443,728 inhabitants in 2000, or about 5 percent of the population of the entire city. Overwhelmingly white, Staten Island has dozens of distinct neighborhoods or towns, and it has the highest proportion of single-family housing and owner-occupied housing in the city. Staten Island has many homes dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. Of special interest are the Conference House (1680), where futile peace negotiations were held between the British and American representatives in 1776 during the American Revolution (1775-1783), and the Voorlezer's House (1695), the nation's oldest surviving elementary school building. Other attractions include the Jacques Marchais Center of Tibetan Art and the Staten Island Zoo. A memorial to Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, who lived on Staten Island in the 1850s, is located in the borough. D The Bronx The Bronx is the fourth largest and the northernmost of the five boroughs, and the only one on the American mainland. Even so, it is surrounded by water on three sides: Long Island Sound on the east, the Harlem and East rivers on the south, and Hudson River on the west. Encompassing 109 sq km (42 sq mi), it had 1,332,650 inhabitants in 2000. Largely residential, the Bronx includes dozens of vibrant neighborhoods. Fieldston is particularly elegant, with great stone houses set among spacious lawns and privatelymaintained streets, while Belmont has become the city's most authentically Italian section. The areas along Pelham Parkway and the northern reaches of the Grand Concourse are particularly prized, because the apartment buildings are well kept and the public parks are easily accessible. City Island retains the charm of a small fishing village. Parts of the Bronx, however, fell victim to decay and abandonment, especially between 1970 and 1980, when the population of the borough fell by 20 percent. The low point occurred in 1976, when future U.S. president Jimmy Carter compared the South Bronx to the bombed-out German city of Dresden after World War II (1939-1945). Since 1980 the process has again reversed and self-help groups have begun to rehabilitate most of the most devastated blocks. The borough's many attractions include the world-famous Bronx Zoo, Yankee Stadium, and the New York Botanical Garden. The Bronx also includes two of the largest middle-income housing projects in the United States. Parkchester, built between 1938 and 1942 for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, houses 40,000 people in apartment buildings arranged along well-planned circular drives. Co-op City is even larger, with 35 apartment towers, 236 townhouses, and more than 50,000 residents. Built between 1968 and 1970 on marshland near the Hutchinson River Parkway, it is the largest single housing complex in the nation. E Manhattan Manhattan, or New York County, is the smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough consists principally of the island of Manhattan, but also includes Governors Island, Randalls Island, Wards Island, Roosevelt Island, U Thant Island, and Marble Hill, a small enclave on the edge of the Bronx mainland. Its land area is 59.5 sq km (23 sq mi). Manhattan's population peaked in 1910 with 2.3 million people, after which it began a slow decline to 1.4 million in 1980. Since then, the population has again begun to increase, reaching 1,537,195 in 2000. Manhattan is the glittering heart of the metropolis. It is the site of virtually all of the hundreds of skyscrapers that are the symbol of the city. Among the more famous of these are the Empire State Building (1931), the Chrysler Building (1930), and Citicorp Center (1977). (The 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center were also among New York's famous skyscrapers until they were destroyed in a terrorist attack in 2001.) Manhattan is also the oldest, densest, and most built-up part of the entire urbanized region. Other noteworthy buildings include City Hall (1802-1811), a Federal-style building with French Renaissance detail; the Seagram Building (1958), an office tower clad in bronze and bronze-colored glass; and Grant's Tomb (1897), the tomb of President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife. Notable religious structures include Saint Patrick's Cathedral (1879), the seat of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (begun 1892), the largest Gothic-style cathedral in the world. Manhattan is the center of New York's cultural life. Numerous stage and motion picture theaters are located around Broadway in Midtown, which includes Times Square. The borough is the home of prominent music and dance organizations, such as the New York City Opera Company, the Metropolitan Opera Association, the PhilharmonicSymphony Society of New York, American Ballet Theatre, and the New York City Ballet. III POPULATION AND AREA New York City has long been unusual because of its sheer size. Even before 1775, when its population was never more than 25,000, it ranked among the five leading cities in the colonies. It surpassed Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 1810 to become the largest city in the United States, and in 1830 it passed Mexico City, Mexico, to become the largest in the western hemisphere. By 1930 it was the largest city in the world. In the 1980s the metro region was surpassed in total size by Tokyo, Japan; Mexico City; and São Paolo, Brazil. Yet with 21.2 million people, the New York City region remains an urban agglomeration of almost unimaginable size. For example, in 2006, when the population of the city itself was 8.2 million, each of its five boroughs was large enough to have been an important city in its own right, with populations exceeding those of many major U.S. cities. The five boroughs of New York City together cover 786 sq km (303 sq mi). The urbanized area, however, includes 28 adjacent counties in New York state, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Together, they make up the New York metropolitan region, which in 2000 housed about 8 percent of the national population on about 0.2 percent of the land area of the contiguous 48 states. Moreover, New York stands at the center of the urbanized northeastern seaboard, which contained about 60 million people in the late 1990s. New York has been among the most ethnically diverse cities in the world since the 1640s, when fewer than 1,000 total residents spoke more than 15 languages. Between 1880 and 1919, more than 23 million Europeans immigrated to the United States. At least 17 million of them disembarked in New York. No one knows how many remained there, but as early as 1880, more than half the city's working population was foreign-born, providing New York with the largest immigrant labor force on earth. Half a century later, the city still contained 2 million foreign-born residents (including 517,000 Russians and 430,000 Italians) and an even larger number of persons of foreign parentage. And at the end of the 20th century, the pattern remained the...